114 Pages
©1996
Publisher: Roof Books
Purchase includes: EPUB, MOBI & PDF

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Tom Raworth was born and grew up in London. During the 1970s he travelled and worked in the USA and Mexico, returning to England in 1977 to be Resident Poet at King's College, Cambridge, in which city he still lives. Since 1966 he has published more than forty books and pamphlets of poetry, prose and translations, in several countries. His graphic work has been shown in France, Italy, and the USA, and he has collaborated and performed with musicians (Steve Lacy, Jo‰lle L‚andre, Steve Nelson-Raney, Esther Roth, Nino Locatelli), painters (Giovanni D'Agostino, Mica‰la Henich), and other poets (Franco Beltrametti, Corrado Costa, Dario Villa). He was editor of three literary/art magazines: outburst (1961-63); Before Your Very Eyes! (1964); and Infolio (1986-87). During the 1960s he also ran two small presses - Matrix and Goliard. Since the early 1970s he has read his work in more than 20 countries, including at many International Literary Festivals, and has been invited to teach, or to be a visiting writer, in France, Italy, the USA, and the Republic of South Africa. Tom Raworth's Collected Poems were published in 2003. His latest collection is Caller and Other Pieces (2007).

Tom Raworth's lines are flecks "reflecting light/from an implied viewpoint," as not from the setting sun but towards it. His lines appear to refer to other narratives and to be also their own sources only. Source of events as "assumptions about history." As apparent reflections from themselves (not from the implied 'larger narrative') the lines are "passing near the black hole/in ordinary flat space." If the lines are "coincidences/moving relative to one another" "irrespective of identity" yet occur through narration "making the visual field/radically estranged," "meaning might be/an inexhaustibility of reference/rather than detailing/flecks that float on the surface/where gaze unfolds."
- Leslie Scalapino

"For more than thirty years, Tom Raworth has been at the forefront of English language writing. With the fastest line in the west, Raworth's flickering, disconsolate, syntactically restless, lilting, often angry, almost balletic poems resist habitual thought at every break, rekindling animate social consciousness. There is no better introduction to Raworth than Clean & Well Lit." 
- Charles Bernstein

"Bricks in the soup nail the soap out of doors? And then the parlors for miles without floors. Long past time the blamed terms rang gone? The Raworth loves to hum them toward the end. "
- Clark Coolidge